As originally proposed, the first year of this project, including seven months of active field work in Muncie, Indiana (Middletown) has been devoted to the development of a comprehensive sociological description of this black community as it existed in the baseline period of 1924-25, a baseline selected to correspond with the period used by the Lynds in the first of their two studies of Muncie (Middletown, 1929). This study and the replication they undertook in 1935 (Middletown in Transition, 1937) virtually omitted consideration of the black community, and the Black Middletown Project was undertaken to fill this critical gap in the sociological account of a community that through repeated study has become increasingly useful as a specimen of the national society. Black Middletown offers the same advantages as a laboratory for the study of social change as the larger community around it; the distribution of significant social characteristics in the black population matches the U.S. distribution exceptionally well; and we have available the abundant data collected during the most recent replication (Middletown III, directed by Theodore Caplow in 1976-1978, under a grant from the National Science Foundation). During the project's first year, we have studied the baseline period of 1924-25 by means of retrospective interviews with 113 elderly persons who were continually resident in Muncie from 1924 to 1980; by the examination and content analysis of all issues of all newspapers having appreciable local circulation in the community at that time; and by the collection of organizational and public records, census materials, maps and directories, and other documentary materials. The reconstruction of the baseline period is about three-quarters complete at the end of 1980 and the first major phase of data collection covering the contemporary community, a general social survey of a five percent random sample of the adult population of Black Middletown, is scheduled to go into the field February 1, 1981.